OK, don't run screaming from the room. The "C" word is getting an early mention. After all, now that Woolworths has closed its shops, someone has to start the festive season while the evenings are still light.

Stir-up Sunday, the traditional day for making plum pudding, is not due until the weekend before advent, but it's never too early for the very best Christmas puds. My mother-in-law gave us a pudding one year which we never ate. When I cooked it the following year, at the ripe old age of 14 months, it turned out to be the most glorious of all puddings that had ever graced our Christmas table. The fruit had darkened to a black sticky richness. Using the language of wine appreciation, I would say this vintage had length.

There is a second good reason to get this chore out of the way now. Spreading the cost of making both the pudding and a Christmas cake (of which more next week), means taking less of a financial hit nearer the event when you are shelling out for everything else. My spend at a wholefood shop on a wheelbarrow-load of dried fruit, almonds and crystallised fruit came to an alarming £40. This was more than enough ingredients for pudding and cake, but it still shocks me how much is needed and – if in a fit of guilt you buy Fairtrade raw materials – how expensive these commodities can be.

I have little involvement in pudding-making to go on. My experience consists of vague memories of watching my mother, and a doomed pudding I once made using Elizabeth David's recipe. Like many others, I am a slave to David. Her ricotta gnocchi, risotto, ragu and osso buco make frequent appearances on our table. Sadly, the famous Christmas pudding she made while living on a Greek island at the outbreak of the Second World War turned out to be a starchy, pasty stinker.

I've decided that good puddings are a matter of how little flour you can get away with, without the pudding losing its infrastructure. I have noted that there is a trend for adding gratings of starchy vegetables like beetroot to cakes and brownies. It is an effective way of keeping them juicy but still with a cake crumb texture.

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Taking a recipe from Phil Vickery's very reliable Proof of the Pudding (now a collector's book, which I recommend seeking out for its great, gooey recipes), I swapped the carrot that he puts in his pudding for grated pumpkin. I have only been able to taste the raw mixture, yet already have made the confident early prediction that this pudding will fulfil all my requirements. It has since been steamed and now waits, wrapped in muslin, on top of a cupboard for Christmas Day.